Joseph Heywood - Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

Fiction
Taxi Dancer
The Berkut
The Domino Conspiracy
The Snowfly

Lute Bapcat Mysteries
Red Jacket
Mountains of the Misbegotten

Grady Service Mysteries
Ice Hunter
Blue Wolf in Green Fire
Chasing a Blond Moon
Running Dark
Strike Dog
Death Roe
Shadow of the Wolf Tree
Force of Blood
Killing a Cold One

Stories
Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories
Harder Ground: More Woods Cop Stories

Non-Fiction
Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

On Becoming an Aspirinaut was previously published in RIVERWATCH.
Versions of The Little Munoscong Academy and
Mister Toms Cabin appeared in Flyanglersonline.com.
Les Truites Rose appeared in the March/April 2014
Grays Sporting Journal
Searching for Frenchmans Pond appeared in the October 2009
Midwest Fly Fishing

To my mother and father, Wilma and Ed; my grandfathers, Harry and Atley; my grandmothers, Mary and Catherine; and to all the Heywoods and Hegwoods for the DNA that has somehow propelled me from then to now

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2003, 2015 by Joseph Heywood

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged an earlier (hardcover) edition as follows: Heywood, Joseph.
Covered waters: tempests of a nomadic trouter / Joseph Heywood.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-58574-766-1 (hc: alk. paper)
1. Trout fishingAnecdotes. 2. Heywood, JosephJourneys. I. Title.
SH687.H44 2003
799.1'757dc21

2002156058

ISBN 978-1-4930-1312-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4930-1825-3 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I t is fast approaching a dozen years since the maiden publication of Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter. Twelve years of course is less than a geological belch in that massive cosmic digestive process we label time. It qualifies by human count as a hair more than a mere decade, far too small and insignificant to matter in cosmological terms, yet those same miniscule dozen years can represent a heap of living in one mans life.

The problem we must all confront in a memoir is ones memory. Just as in life, it is difficult to revisit the past. Heraclitus tells us, You cant step in the same river twice. He is referring to a physical revisitation, by which I think he means that time has changed, you have changed, and the river has changed. Add to this the vagaries of memory and aging filters, and the problem of going back is clearly magnified.

Writers and artists tend to see almost everything differently than normal carbon units. The late great Virginia Woolf wrote: An ordinary mind on an ordinary day amasses impressions haphazardly, inattentively, and keeps a latent but later accessible stock of... encounters from which rises a sense of self, which is then the product of its conditioning by this random accumulation.

We shall not be intimidated by the realities of our inborn deficiencies.

The original Covered Waters began with a stroke and ended with my wife Sandys unexpected death. Much water has been experienced since then, and lots of adventures. Some stories didnt quite make it into the initial collection, one of them because it was then still too close to the events. Im not going to write a full report this time, but it does merit a brief note in this update. Im still not comfortable with laying out some of the most sensitive details from this event, but the story never became public and has never been told in full.

It was the nineties and three of our Upjohn employees were kidnapped by entrepreneurial freedom-fighter-terrorists of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of ColombiaPeoples Army, or, en espanol, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de ColombiaEjrcito del Pueblo, FARCEP (largely a ransom-for-cash mob, then and now). The events took place in the Cordillera Oriental (the East Andes) of southwest Colombia. Two of the trio were held for three weeks until we could gather the cash in country and then pay for and arrange their release. The third captive was freed early on to go out to the world and arrange for ransom money. That individual called back to the companys headquarters in Kalamazoo.

There were all kinds of strange asides and events over those three weeks, including an attempted escape by the two barefoot hostages, who were soon run to ground in the jungle; but the entire story is extensive and must be saved for the future. One thing I can disclose now is that we did not inform US authorities (FBI) until we had our people safely back to Miami and that we informed the Polica Nacional de Colombia (federal police in Colombia) only because our bagman got stopped at a random roadblock and was jailed on the assumption that all the ransom cash he was carrying was somehow wrapped up with drug dealers. Which it literally was: The Upjohn Company.

I would make one further observation. This situation demonstrated to me then, as life often has, that come a crisis calling, there can be an insurmountable difference and disconnect between leadership and management (leading versus managing). In this instance, a tall steel-nerved Canadian gentleman named Ley Smith stepped up and led the way to getting our people safely home. Start to finish, Ley walked the walk. I would have willingly followed him anywhere, and still would. Over the course of ones life, there are not many people you can say that about. All ended well, but those of us involved in the deal were worn out at the end of three weeks. Perhaps this will one day be a book unto itself.

More to the point, in the years since the first Covered Waters , I married Madelon Louise Miars Richardson (aka Lonnie Lou and Jambe Longue). We were married on the first day of spring, March 20, 2010, by none other than the Reverend Godfrey Grant (aka God, or G2, my/our longtime fishing partner and dear friendhis title internetly ordained). Ms. Mary Lou Wright stood for Lonnie, and my pal and fellow Bullshido Campmate Bob Robochef Peterson did the honors for me. Robochef and I also shared a lot of the complex issues involved in the Colombian kidnapping episode, so we have been to more than a few interesting life-dances together, both personally (2015 will be thirty-nine years of Bullshido fishing camp) and professionally.

The most dramatic change in our conjoined life is that Lonnie (artist and retired teacher) and I now live six months of the year in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.). We spent half of five consecutive years in Deer Park in the Eastern Upper Peninsula (EUP) within a couple hundred yards of the Lake Superior beach. We now live on the Ford Center Michigan Tech Forestry Campus in Alberta, up into the Herman Hills eight miles south of LAnse in Baraga County.

Three-seasoning ATB (Above the Bridge) and wintering in Portage BTB (Below the Bridge) puts us on migratory par with dollar-butts (northern flickers) and juncos, which follow the same route and timing.